Next pandemic may spread from super bugs in hospitals, expert warns

Former New York Lt. Gov. Betsy McCaughey, the chairman and founder of the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths, warns that "our next pandemic might not be a virus, it might be drug-resistant infections, antibiotic-resistant infections."

"This is one of the most lasting lessons: the importance of clean hospitals and rigorous protocols to prevent the spread of infection," McCaughey told the John Solomon Reports podcast on Wednesday. "We don't have accurate data in the United States about how many people contracted COVID inside the hospital. But we know that in England, 20% of the people in the hospital with COVID caught it in the hospital."

While hospitals during the COVID pandemic "were very taxed, overcrowded, these heroic healthcare workers were working overtime..." she said, "we also know that infection prevention in hospitals is very lax. We know that in ordinary times, before COVID, at least 75,000 people a year — can you imagine? — and probably quite a bit more than that, it's an undercount, die from infections they contract after they go to the hospital for something else. They get an infection in the hospital. It kills more people than AIDS and breast cancer combined. It is one of the largest killers in the United States."

McCaughey, author of a book titled "The Next Pandemic," explained how hospitals are not following proper cleaning protocols, which leads to the spread of infection among patients.

"And what is to blame for it? Inadequately cleaned equipment, unclean hands, stethoscopes that are put on one chest after another without being cleaned first, doctors who don't clean their hands in between treating patients," she said. "Very inadequate cleaning of hospital rooms.

"We know that, for example, the most prevalent hospital infection is something called C. diff, Clostridium difficile. We can map in a hospital who's going to get it because it occurs in the same rooms over and over again. You're put in a room where a previous patient had C. diff, your risk of getting it goes way up because that patient was discharged — maybe it was three patients ago, four patients ago — but the C. diff is still there in the mattress.

"Our next pandemic might not be a virus, it might be drug-resistant infections, antibiotic-resistant infections.

"All of our access to all the medical miracles that we can produce now because of research, medical miracles to treat patients who have cancer and AIDS and so many other ailments, access to all that medical science has to offer depends on being able to go in a hospital and not feel that it's an unacceptable risk. So we have to keep the infection rate down."

There are new technologies that can prevent the spread of viruses, bacteria, and fungi, but hospitals aren't using them, according to McCaughey.

"We must improve hospital infection control, and particularly cleanliness," she said. "And there are so many new technologies that can automatically and continuously destroy viruses and bacteria and funguses — that's a big threat now in hospitals — funguses inside the hospital, and still be safe for patients. You can install them in the HVAC system. There are antimicrobial hydrogen peroxide misters, UV lights — there are several different technologies, all of which work, but hospitals need to employ them."

She criticized the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for not encouraging the use of these new technologies in hospitals and instead following old infection prevention protocols for COVID-19.

"And the CDC, which we have seen during this pandemic has been an utter failure, the CDC has never encouraged hospitals to go high tech," she lamented. "It's such a shame. They've been very Luddite about it.

"About four months ago, maybe five months ago now, they put out guidelines — how to reopen a school, how to reopen an office building. They said set the desks six feet apart and open the windows. That could have been written in 1900. Think about it. That's what they had to say? They couldn't talk about the antimicrobial coatings that you can put on the doorknobs and desks so that the pathogens won't be transferred from one person to the next when they touch those surfaces? They couldn't talk about the high tech instruments that we can put in the existing HVAC system to zap the viruses in the air? Why didn't they talk about those things? Why aren't they testing those things and recommending them?"